Predicting Your AI Agent's Cost

I spent 2025 speaking at various developer/tech events around North America and out of all the feedback I received there was one thing that kept resurfacing: Agents sounds interesting-- but how can I better predict the costs as I experiment? Today I'm hoping to shed some light on how you can predict costs for agents you develop and deploy on AWS. The tools and methods I'll cover are specific to deploying agents using AWS services, so be sure to check pricing with any third-party tools, extensions etc to get a full picture of what your costs can be if you're using those within your applications as well. Suffice it to say, estimating costs before you go to production is tricky because agent costs are emergent, basically they depend on how many steps the agent takes, how long the context grows, what tools it invokes, and how often it's called. I'll address the elements that we can control and share best practices for areas that are controlled/modified as you develop. Pricing Out Your Agen